No fairways for Egypt

Dead Bodies, Smashed Hopes, Torched Beliefs is what is happening in Egypt and it appears to be a precursor to a wider conflict.

Maybe a local conflict, or even a regional war, between the traditional elite state actors and their poor neighbours. It’s easy to turn the Arab Spring into Desert Rising. All it takes is unlimited angst…

I’ve heard it said that Egypt’s collective intelligence seems to sense that a famine approaches soon. It’s a struggle to live.

As of this morning, Reuters news service reported the death toll in Egypt had reached at least 2,525 people, while health officials say thousands more are seriously wounded.

Back in July, CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward explained why the protesters have been so aggressive in their demands…

They want a fairer Constitution, laws that respect the rights of women and religious minorities, and a government that is less exclusive. President Mohammed Morsi stacked his government with his Muslim Brotherhood and did not allow dissent. Yet Egyptian people want a government focused on addressing the most pressing economic issues, the coming famines and not religious orthodoxy.

Military and government generals promised to work towards reconciliation in an attempt to appease the angry protesters in Egypt.

Today we see that they have responded with a massacre instead.

In the aftermath of this week’s tragedy in Egypt, Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin said, “You can’t have a segment of the population that has a lot of support and views this as an illegitimate military led government, to be shut off from the Democratic process.” He’s right because Egypt today looks more like a dictatorship, rather than a Democracy…

The Muslim Brotherhood gained power in Egypt in one of the only examples of Non-Secular Muslim Rule gained through the ballot.
They overreached, as Religious Zealots always will, and became oppressive in Governance. They were rejected by the Egyptian People, and the Military stepped-in.
Chaos is resulting.
To characterize this as a battle between the Poor and the Elites is absurd.

Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code that prohibits alcohol, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope.

In the meantime, journalists indicate that most all leaders in the United States and Europe have sharply criticized Egypt’s ruling generals for their extreme violent crackdown.

According to the Washington Post: “White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration “strongly condemns” the violence and opposes the emergency decree, which under Mubarak lasted the length of his tenure.”

“The violence that we saw overnight is a step in the wrong direction,” Earnest said. “It is an indication that they’re not currently following through on their promise to transition back to a democratically elected civilian government, that they’re not committed to an inclusive process.”

But the words the administration used, as well as the one it continued to avoid to describe Egypt’s abrupt change of government — “coup” — suggested that Obama and his advisers are out of ideas for how to exert even modest influence over events on the ground.

The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a cauldron of blood and suffering.

The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give followers of the movement a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You cannot get married. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing global economy, a world where the wretched of the Earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe.

News like this really gets under my skin…

How can any one powerful individual or group of people become so fervently obsessed with one way of life that they’d go to such great lengths to bring mayhem upon so many innocent people — and one’s own people, no less?

Last week we wrote about the seeds of revolution being reborn.

Today, I think it’s important to consider the seeds of liberty, being reborn.

Or the economic benefits of war…

And the strife born out of Climate Change.

Egypt always experienced rebellion when the Nile’s water run low and the agriculture seemed to be failing.

And let’s not forget the Circle of Fire all over the Middle East. Because this conflagration is an animus in disguise of a wider conflict the seeds of which have been sown many decade ago…

Although a civil war in Egypt on the devastating scale of Algeria’s bloody civil war of the 1990’s seems likely, but it is easily conceivable by anyone smart enough to see — that an armed resistance linked to the Brotherhood will emerge from this summer’s events — leading up to it. Historically, Egypt’s Islamist cadres, even at their most potent, have lacked the arms, the leadership, the terrain, and the internal and international networks that would enable them to challenge the U.S.-equipped and U.S.-funded Egyptian military full on. The country’s Islamist opposition is split between the Brotherhood and looser networks of Salafis, a division that limits the potential of any insurgency that either faction might mount. Yet a return to generation-spanning, uncompromising struggle in Egypt—some of it brutal and violent—now appears much more likely.

But why we are so obsessed with Egypt? Maybe because it is a tourist destination? Or is it because as the headlines are dominated by the uprising for Democracy under the pyramids, turning to a giant fail in Egypt, and as the clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and government forces claimed between 600 and 2,600 hundred lives — depending who is counting — is not getting any of the media attention. None of that…

It’s the WAR stupid. This is the answer. That is Why we hear and talk about it a lot. Because the continuously escalating violence in Iraq, where more than 1,000 people have been killed since July of this year — is just a WAR. An illegal WAR to be sure, but war none the less. All is fair in love and war is what the Bard reminds us of.

Yet the real story is that more than 10 years after it began, and 20 months since conditional US and UK withdrawal, the illegal Iraq War continues to be a disaster of epic proportions, with a seemingly limitless supply of unintended consequences. Cheney’s-bush and Blair-witch, brought this nasty illegal war upon us for their private benefit — and now we all pay the price. And will be paying it for many years to come.

Reports that the US efforts in IRAQ are now focused on making sure Iraq’s Shiite government doesn’t get too close to Iran’s Shiite government, are bollocks. The story that Iran is sending weapons to Syria, whose conflict is destabilizing key US ally Jordan — are everywhere — are a false flag. And yet the Drums of War keep beating mercilessly. Realistically the IRAQ war is a war that keeps on giving. It’s been proven a boon to all the Military Industrial and Petroleum concerns. Their apparatus is making out like bandits now that the Iraq war’s catastrophic impact remains inversely related to our desire to reckon with how it happened.

And the drums of war keep on getting louder and coming closer all the time. Who is next?

Still from my perspective I consider the plight of the underage children in Egypt who lost both Mother and Father to the Military’s bullets this past weekend. Or the young girl whose head was blown away and is still alive in excruciating pain because she cannot accept anesthesia lest her brain shuts down… Tragic new abound. Yet as heartbreaking all these stories are — they serve to remind me why I so passionately stand for libertarian views: the freedom to live life as one chooses, so long as he/she is not imposing harm on others in a society with smaller government control in order to effectively advance individual happiness and promote more vital communities and a richer culture.

Yours,

Pano

PS:

We need to let the seeds of Liberty be watered.

But it seems the Egyptian military s already doing a good job of it spilling so much innocent blood…

Because even if the elites are going to “win” it’s all the Egyptians that are going to survive as well as the talented materialists.

Cause if the people have the right educations, the strong weapons, the progression analysis, and the drive to keep their babies fed — they are set.